


Legacies

by marikunin



Series: Sehnsucht [13]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Real Person Fiction
Genre: Canon Autistic Character, Canon Character of Color, Canon Disabled Character, Gen, The Rapture (Christianity)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 08:49:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9314264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marikunin/pseuds/marikunin
Summary: Reincarnation and spiritual legacies weren't the same.





	

Reincarnation and spiritual legacies weren't the same. Whereas the eastern religions of the world believed in living over and over again in different bodies and minds, western religions-specifically the Abrahamic religions-believed otherwise.

In Sunday school, she was taught that everyone had a spiritual legacy. They all came from Adam and Eve's, but the father and mother of humanity tossed theirs aside when they rebelled in the Garden. Jesus's death and resurrection made it so that anyone could be joined to the Savior's perfect legacy.

The teachers Mary had had over the years explained it in various analogies that grew in complexity as time went by. But her favorite was by far the plant analogy. Reincarnation was a plant returning after dying in winter year after year. Meanwhile, spiritual legacies were like a plant leaving behind a sapling and the sapling living on. They had been very adamant in explaining how the concepts were not the same.

They had also been warned how going on the wrong path would only lead to disaster...and eventually, eternal damnation. It was a whole theme in the Left Behind series, which Mary now despised.

She spent her teenage years being terrified of being, well, left behind. Of being sent to Hell. She had night terrors until anxiety medicine made them go away when she was 20.

Mary still followed Jesus and everything...but she wouldn't let fear borne of bigotry and a desire to stay apathetic to the plights of others drive her up the wall. When she found out the whole Rapture movement came about as a counterattack to the Civil Rights movements in the 1960s...it was one of the closest times she had come to entering the Avatar State involuntarily.

Everyone had a choice of what legacy they wanted to leave behind, if they left one at all.

Except the Avatar.

They had a legacy that, if they managed to rise up from obscurity into world wide fame, would irrevocably change the world.

Right now, Mary imagined the Church to be a mess. The outer landscape-the way it presented itself to the world at large-was covered in weeds and had wild animals lurking within. The building representative of the Church itself was dusty, in need of repair, moldy, smelled bad, and however many more problems. Even Found Avatars like Joan of Arc could only do a small bit to repair things.

But Mary was a healer.

In a dream, Jesus said she would heal the Church from the outside in, and her sister would clean up the landscape around it.

The Church needed to be cleansed with the power of the endless sea. Like the famous nonbender Martin Luther King Jr. had said, righteousness would flow like a river and justice like a neverfailing stream.

And Mary couldn't wait to release the purifying waters.


End file.
